m all
interests save one; a certain frigid insanity of preoccupation with our
own emotion. And this emotion, for the sake of which every earthly
feeling turns to ice, is our Death-hunger, our eternal craving to make
_what has been_ be again, and again, forever!

The essence of immorality lies not in the hot flame of natural, or
even unnatural, desire. It lies in that inhuman and forbidden wish to
arrest _the processes of life_--to lay a freezing hand--a dead hand--upon
what we love, so that it _shall always be the same._ The really
immoral thing is to isolate, from among the affections and passions
and attractions of this human world, one particular lure; and then,
having endowed this with the living body of "eternal death," to bend
before it, like the satyr before the dead nymph in Aubrey's drawing,
and murmur and mutter and shudder over it, through the eternal
recurrence of all things!

Is it any longer concealed from us wherein the "immorality" of this
lies? It lies in the fact that what we worship, what we _will not,_
through eternity, let go, is not a living person, but the "body" of a
person; a person who has so far been "drugged," as not only to die
for us--that is nothing!--but to remain dead for us, through all the
years!

In his own life--with that lovely consumptive Child-bride dying by
his side--Edgar Allen Poe lived as "morally," as rigidly, as any
Monk. The popular talk about his being a "Drug-Fiend" is ridiculous
nonsense. He was a laborious artist, chiselling and refining his
"artificial" poems, day in and day out. Where his "immorality" lies is
much deeper. It is in the mind--the mind, Master Shallow!--for he is
nothing if not an absolute "Cerebralist." Certainly Poe's verses are
"artificial." They are the most artificial of all poems ever written.
And this is natural, because they were the premeditated expression
of a premeditated cult. But to say they are artificial does not
derogate from their genius. Would that there were more such
"artificial" verses in the world!

One wonders if it is clearly understood how the "unearthly" element
in Poe differs from the "unearthly" element in Shelley. It differs
from it precisely as Death differs from Life.

Shelley's ethereal spiritualism--though, God knows, such gross
animals are we, it seems inhuman enough--is a passionate white
flame. It is the thin, wavering fire-point of all our struggles after
purity and eternity. It is a centrifugal emotion, not, a